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Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

by LaurenShields Posted on January 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday evening, as the news broke that conservative author Dinesh D’Souza had been indicted by the feds for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to an unnamed 2012 Senate candidate (widely presumed to be Wendy Long, a long-shot Republican who was crushed by incumbent Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York), liberal commentators had trouble hiding their glee—or, what I called on Twitter, Dineshenfreude. After all, for years D’Souza has been a right-wing bad boy spouting the most noxious criticism of the left and being rewarded for his exploits. More recently, he was the fellow who derived the odious theory that President Barack Obama could only be understood if viewed as the secret keeper of the flame of Kenyan anti-colonialism—a notion that Newt Gingrich giddily embraced and promoted. D’Souza’s movie, 2016: Obama’s America, contends that Obama, driven by the remnants of this anti-colonial rage inherited from his father, had a covert second-term plan to weaken and impoverish the United States of America. It depicts Obama as anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-white.

D’Souza’s extremism traces back to his college days, when he was an editor of the Dartmouth Review, the leading conservative college publication of the early 1980s. (Wendy Long was a Dartmouth student and served as a trustee of the Review in the 1990s.) In that post, D’Souza became a hero to young conservatives across the nation (and the right-wing foundations looking to fund them). While he helmed the Review, it published a “lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader”—accompanied by a staged photo of a black person hanging from a tree—and an assault on affirmative action titled, “Dis Sho Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” which was written in Ebonics. (“Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be up over our ‘fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa.”) The “Jive” article caused Jack Kemp, a conservative icon mindful of the right’s problems with minority outreach, to resign from the Review‘s advisory board. Decades later, it’s clear that D’Souza chose the path of the foul at an early point. But he also had trouble with trustworthiness—as I discovered in an early encounter.

In 1982, I attended—that is, snuck into—a conference for conservative students journalists held at the New York Athletic Club and sponsored by foundations eager to spread the conservative gospel on college campuses. D’Souza was received at this affair as royalty. And at lunch, I had the good fortune to share a table with him. There he bragged about the Review having made use of a list of Dartmouth alumni it had somehow procured—without the university’s approval—for a mailing. (The university maintained the Review had misappropriated the list and committed a copyright violation.) He and his surrounding acolytes also gloated over an infamous Review article that had outed members of Dartmouth’s Gay Student Association and published excerpts of letters written by the group’s members. (As a result of this article, some members of the group had their sexual orientation disclosed to friends and family members.)

Nine years later, when D’Souza was being hailed upon the publication of his book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus—the Washington Post called him “palpably smart,” “sober-minded,” and a “gentleman”—I wrote a short piece in The Nation and recalled that I had once witnessed him boasting about improperly purloining documents for the gay-naming article.

D’Souza cried foul, claiming that the Review had not used any underhanded means to gain access to information about the members of the Gay Student Association. I searched my old notes, and it seemed I had conflated two overlapping moments from that lunch, misattributing D’Souza’s boast about the alumni mailing list caper to the outing article.

I duly noted this in a subsequent correction. But here’s where it gets interesting. In his response to my original article, D’Souza had maintained that the Review had only printed the names of the officers of the Gay Student Association, and it had located this information, along with the personal letters written by gay students, in publicly available records the group had filed with the school administration. In other words, the Review had done nothing untoward to unearth the names of the gay students it outed; the paper had merely relied on public information submitted by the group itself. (Put aside, for the sake of this tale, the probity—or mean-spiritedness—of outing a fellow student whose sexual orientation might not be known beyond the campus gay community. As the New York Times reported at the time, “One gay student named by the Review, according to his friends, became severely depressed and talked repeatedly of suicide. The grandfather of another who had not found the courage to tell his family of his homosexuality learned about his grandson when he got his copy of the Review in the mail.”)

At first, I took D’Souza at this word, accepting his account that the Review had used public information for its article naming the officers of the Gay Student Association, and conveyed that in the correction. That was a mistake on my part. After D’Souza complained about the correction, I decided to investigate further. I called Dolores Johnson, director of student activities at Dartmouth. She said it was “absolutely untrue” that the documents the GSA had filed with the school were open to the public. Certainly, she explained, the GSA, like all student groups, had provided her office the names of its officers and a constitution (and perhaps letters written by students about the group). But, she said, “I would never give that information out to the public.” And there was this: She pointed out that shortly before the Review published its article naming the gay students, some documents had disappeared from the GSA’s desk in a student center. Johnson noted that these missing documents were the ones cited in the Review story.

So the evidence—at least, Johnson’s account—suggested that foul play had been involved in the outing article. And D’Souza’s self-serving cover story—we obtained the information from public records—was undercut. He had duped me. Not surprisingly, after I returned to this matter in the pages of The Nation to relate Johnson’s description of the events and partially retract the correction, D’Souza did not respond. His silence spoke loudly.

Much of what D’Souza did in college as a rising conservative star foreshadowed the career of ideological nastiness to come. But relishing the outing of gay students (and at that luncheon there was much relishing) and engaging in dirty tricks to obtain those names—well, that speaks not to ideology, but character. And it is but one reason, even if now dusty, why D’Souza warrants little sympathy for being accused of once again breaking the rules to serve his ideological aims.

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Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

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FBI Arrests "The Most Hated Man on the Internet," Revenge-Porn King Hunter Moore

by MariMockmrmwf Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Thursday morning, the FBI arrested 27-year-old Hunter Moore, the founder of “Is Anyone Up,” a now defunct website dedicated to publishing revenge porn—softcore or hardcore amateur pornography supposedly submitted by scorned, anonymous exes and usually accompanied by the purported names and addresses of the people (usually women) depicted. Moore—dubbed “The Most Hated Man on the Internet” by Rolling Stone—was taken into custody along with Charles Evens, 25, for allegedly conspiring to hack into the email accounts of hundreds of victims in order to steal nude photos and post them online. Moore and Evens were indicted in federal court in California and charged with one count of conspiracy, seven counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer, and seven counts of aggravated identity theft.

According to the Village Voice, Moore’s website posted over two dozen nude photos a day, almost always of women, along with screenshots of the victims’ names, social media accounts, and location, which he added in order to maximize Google search traffic. Last year, he was fined $250,000 for defamation after accusing an anti-bullying activist of possessing child porn. The local US attorney’s office released a statement on the arrest. Here’s an excerpt:

To obtain more photos to populate the site, Moore allegedly instructed Evens to gain unauthorized access to – in other words, to hack into – victims’ e-mail accounts. Moore sent payments to Evens in exchange for nude photos obtained unlawfully from the victims’ accounts. Moore then posted the illegally obtained photos on his website, without the victims’ consent. The indictment alleges that Evens hacked into email accounts belonging to hundreds of victims.

Read the full indictment here:

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FBI Arrests "The Most Hated Man on the Internet," Revenge-Porn King Hunter Moore

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President Obama Finally Releases His Surveillance Reform Plan, and It’s Pretty Weak Tea

by DemetriusGallag Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Obama gave his big surveillance speech today, and it was pretty limited. Aside from some fairly vague promises about new oversight and greater transparency, here were his most important concrete proposals:

  1. The Director of National Intelligence will conduct an annual review of FISA court opinions with the aim of declassifying opinions that have “broad privacy concerns.”
  2. Obama will ask Congress to create a “panel of advocates” that will represent the public’s privacy interests in FISA cases.
  3. New restrictions will be placed on the use of “incidental” collection of surveillance of US persons in criminal cases.
  4. National Security Letters will remain secret, but secrecy won’t be indefinite unless the government demonstrates a “real need” to a judge. Companies receiving NSLs will be allowed to release broad reports about the number of requests they get.
  5. Bulk telephone records will continue to be collected. However, in the future the database can be queried only after getting FISA approval. The NSA will be allowed to perform only 2-hop chaining rather than the current 3-hop standard. A new group will investigate alternative approaches to the government itself holding the telephone database.
  6. Within some unspecified limits, there will be no more bugging of foreign leaders.

This is fairly weak tea. Nonetheless, I’m pretty certain that we wouldn’t have gotten even this much if it weren’t for Edward Snowden. This is why I support Snowden’s disclosures despite the fact that I’m not happy about every last thing he’s disclosed. Obama’s attempt to suggest that he would have done all this stuff even without Snowden’s disclosures strikes me as laughable.

You can read a full copy of the presidential directive accompanying Obama’s speech here.

UPDATE: I should be a little clearer about why I think this is weak tea. Of these items, only the first five concern domestic surveillance. #1 and #2 are pretty hazy, with the DNI apparently having full control over this new declassification regime and the public being represented in FISA cases only by a “panel of advocates,” a phrase that somehow strikes me as a bit weaselly. But we’ll see.

#3 is very important if the new restrictions are pretty tight. But that’s not clear yet.

#4 is nice, but doesn’t go very far. At a minimum, I’d like to see much tighter standards for issuing secret NSLs in the first place.

#5, if it’s implemented well, could be a genuine improvement. Records retention per se is something the government often mandates, and as long as the records are truly kept away from the intelligence community, accessible only via court order with an advocate aggressively arguing the public’s case, this is a useful reform.

Julian Sanchez tweets: “Initial verdict: A decent start, better than I expected, but we really need legislation to cement this, & the details will matter a lot.” That’s a little more optimistic than my initial verdict, but it’s probably fair. We really won’t be able to fully evaluate all this until we see what the detailed rules look like. Good intentions aren’t enough.

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President Obama Finally Releases His Surveillance Reform Plan, and It’s Pretty Weak Tea

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“She Might Have Had a Case If She Had Been Unconscious During the Rape”

by GarfieldLanglan Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

To Montanans, Missoula is a college town of about 68,000 with a laid-back, hippie vibe. But elsewhere, Missoula is also known as the “rape capital” of the country.

Between January 2008 and May 2012, Missoula police received more than 350 sexual assault reports, including multiple cases of assault allegedly committed by University of Montana football players. The US Department of Justice found that city officials did not adequately handle all of these reports—going so far as to charge that police were using “sex-based stereotypes” to discriminate against women who reported rape. Last month, the Justice Department proposed an agreement that would require the Missoula County Attorney’s office to make a number of changes. DOJ recommended adding two or three new staff positions, including an advocate for victims; ramping up training for county supervisors and prosecutors; and collecting more data on sexual assault cases, including feedback from victims. Last week, the county’s chief prosecutor rejected the offer and told the feds to take a hike, insisting they have no authority to tell his office what to do.

“The DOJ is clearly overstepping in the investigation of my office,” Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg tells Mother Jones. “The Missoula Police Department and our office have done a very good job of handling sexual assault allegations regardless of what national and local news accounts may indicate.”

Missoula’s rape problem rose to national attention when six members of the University of Montana football team, the Grizzlies, were accused of committing, attempting, or helping cover-up sexual assault between 2009 and 2012. In March 2012, facing scrutiny over how it was handling assault allegations leveled against athletes, the university fired its football coach and athletic director. In May 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder said he was launching a federal investigation into whether Missoula officials and the university were discriminating against female rape victims, noting he found the allegations “very disturbing.”

In May 2013, the Justice Department released findings from its investigation, indicating officials in Missoula were indeed discriminating against female victims in sexual assault cases. For example, according to the Justice Department’s report, one Missoula detective allegedly told a woman who said she was vomiting during her sexual assault—she was allegedly raped by several people—that “she might have had a case if if she had been unconscious during the rape rather than merely incapacitated.” In another case where a woman reported vaginal and anal rape, a detective reportedly asked her why she hadn’t fought harder, noting, “tell me the truth—is this something we want to go through with?” (Van Valkenburg says, “Both our office and the police are very much aware of what is necessary to legally prove that a woman who is incapacitated by alcohol and/or drugs did not consent to a sexual act. Local prosecutors fully understand these issuesâ&#128;&#139;.”) The Justice Department also determined that the Missoula attorney’s office provides “no information” to local police as to why it declines to prosecute sexual assault cases and police are “frustrated” with the “lack of follow-up and prosecution.” (Missoula Police Captain Mike Coyler says, “As a general rule, I disagree with this.”)

The month it released those findings, the Justice Department entered into agreements with the University of Montana and the Missoula Police Department to beef up resources to combat rape. (Lucy France, legal counsel for the university, says that she disagrees with the Justice Department’s findings that the university discriminated against victims and botched investigations, but “we agreed to work to continue to improve our responses to reports.”) Last month, the US Attorney for Montana proposed that the Missoula County Attorney’s office enter a similar agreement to ensure that it responds to sexual assault without discrimination. In response, Van Valkenburg wrote in a January 9 letter that his office would commit to help the police department and the university meet their commitments—but he wouldn’t make the Justice Department’s recommended changes to his office.

“Missoula County Attorneys Office does not need to enter into an agreement with DOJ to protect victims of sexual assault, we have actively assisted victims for years,” Van Valkenburg wrote, arguing that the two federal statutes that the Justice Department cites—one of which deals with gender discrimination—do not legally justify imposing changes on his office. The prosecutor is correct that the Justice Department can’t force recommendations on the office, says Christopher Mallios, an attorney advisor for AEquitas, which receives funding from the Department of Justice to help local prosecutors better handle sexual violence cases. But he adds, that if the Justice Department is able to prove civil rights violations in court, a judge could enforce them. Van Valkenburg says that his office is already meeting many of the Justice Department’s demands, and even if he had the funding, he wouldn’t add the three new staff members the feds want, because they’d represent “a duplication of services” provided by other city units. Van Valkenburg says if the Justice Department doesn’t back off in the next two weeks, he will take the issue to federal court.

“I’m not aware of another case where a prosecutor said we would rather litigate and go to trial than make some changes,” Mallios says. And other experts say the prosecutor’s response is unusual: “No prosecutor wants to admit that they have shortcomings, especially on such a sensitive issue,” says Sarah Deer, who worked for the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “But there is a culture in some offices that sexual assault is sort of overstated or victims tend to lie. That might be what’s going on here—a culture of indifference.”

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“She Might Have Had a Case If She Had Been Unconscious During the Rape”

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Green Zones: A Map of the US Military’s Golf Courses

by Reinold Keillor Posted on January 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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The United States military is undeniably massive. In 2012, the Pentagon spent 4.4% of our GDP on defense, with hundreds of billions going to contractors for assorted weapons, equipment, and essentials. What is not known is exactly how much money funds the military’s international golf habit. Mother Jones has found that the Pentagon currently operates at least 194 golf courses and 2,874 holes of golf worldwide. Hover over any flag to tee up more information about the location, name, and size of these courses.

Source: See all data

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Green Zones: A Map of the US Military’s Golf Courses

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Reddit’s Gun Gang Takes Aim at MoJo With a Pink Assault Rifle

by YolandaFoust Posted on January 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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When we published our investigation of gun trafficking on Reddit—including the company’s endorsement of assault rifles emblazoned with its signature alien logo—the story promptly got yanked from Reddit’s popular /r/Politics subreddit. Apparently one of the /r/Politics moderators known as “TheRedditPope” deemed our story “off topic.”

Lots of Redditors on the /r/Guns subreddit, on the other hand, found the story to be sufficiently political. In response to it they let loose with much talk about liberal “gun grabbers,” the Second Amendment coming under siege and so forth. But perhaps the most enthusiastic response came from Redditor “WarFairy,” who decided to honor Mother Jones with its very own 3-D printable AR-15 lower receiver, featuring a “raspberry metallic” finish and the company’s phone number. Indeed, the Second Amendment may be in grave danger, but clearly the First is hanging tough.

The dudes of /r/Guns deserve a couple of points for creativity here, though probably no one will accuse them of being super classy.

“I would like to mass print these and hand them out to the kids on Halloween,” declared one commenter. (What a hilarious thing to joke about, especially given that kids and pink guns mix so well.)

“It looks like it has a boner,” said another.

“A glorious pink one,” replied WarFairy, who clarified that the feature in question was “actually a finger hook for use when using a magwell style grip while firing. Just a little design flair of mine.”

Another Redditor saw the feature from a different angle, likening it to female genitals, to which WarFairy replied: “Throbbing… moist… aluring… oh yes… imagine it… imagine running your fingers over it, listening to the whisper… P… Pull my trigger…”

The response to MoJo’s investigation also included multiple Redditors attempting to list guns for sale in the comments section of our story and then getting their buddies to vote up those comments (a vote-manipulation tactic that Reddit itself forbids). “Now motherjones has become an internet weapons market. TA DA!” one of them said.

Unfortunately, in their careful reading of our report, these folks missed a key distinction between Reddit and Mother Jones: Such postings are a violation of our Terms of Service, and thus have been deleted.

For more of the story behind our investigation, check out my conversation with WNYC’s Anna Sale.

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Reddit’s Gun Gang Takes Aim at MoJo With a Pink Assault Rifle

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Nun Faces up to 30 Years for Breaking Into Weapons Complex, Embarrassing the Feds

by RochelleQuinter Posted on January 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Nestled behind a forested ridgeline on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee, is the sprawling Y-12 National Security Complex, America’s “Fort Knox” of weapons grade uranium. The complex’s security cameras and machine gun nests are designed to repel an attack by the world’s most feared terrorist organizations, but they were no match for Sister Megan Rice, an 83-year-old Catholic nun armed with nothing more than a hammer and bolt cutters.

In the dark morning hours of July 28, 2012, Rice and two fellow anti-war activists bushwhacked up to the edge of Y-12, cut through three separate security fences, and sprayed peace slogans and human blood (see below) on the wall of a building that is said to hold enough weapons-grade uranium to obliterate human civilization several times over. They remained inside Y-12 for more than an hour before they were detected.

“The security breach,” as the Department of Energy’s Inspector General later described it, exposed “troubling displays of ineptitude” at what is supposed to be “one of the most secure facilities in the United States.” At a February hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, multiple members of Congress thanked Rice for exposing the site’s gaping vulnerabilities. But that didn’t deter federal prosecutors from throwing the book at Rice and her accomplices: Greg Boertje-Obed, a 57-year-old carpenter, and Michael Walli, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran. They now sit in Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center, awaiting a January 28 sentencing hearing where a federal judge could put them in prison for up to 30 years.

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Nun Faces up to 30 Years for Breaking Into Weapons Complex, Embarrassing the Feds

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New Memo: Kissinger Gave the "Green Light" for Argentina’s Dirty War

by WinifredTrimm Posted on January 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Only a few months ago, Henry Kissinger was dancing with Stephen Colbert in a funny bit on the latter’s Comedy Central show. But for years, the former secretary of state has sidestepped judgment for his complicity in horrific human rights abuses abroad, and a new memo has emerged that provides clear evidence that in 1976 Kissinger gave Argentina’s neo-fascist military junta the “green light” for the dirty war it was conducting against civilian and militant leftists that resulted in the disappearance—that is, deaths—of an estimated 30,000 people.

In April 1977, Patt Derian, a onetime civil rights activist whom President Jimmy Carter had recently appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights, met with the US ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill. A memo recording that conversation has been unearthed by Martin Edwin Andersen, who in 1987 first reported that Kissinger had told the Argentine generals to proceed with their terror campaign against leftists (whom the junta routinely referred to as “terrorists”). The memo notes that Hill told Derian about a meeting Kissinger held with Argentine Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Guzzetti the previous June. What the two men discussed was revealed in 2004 when the National Security Archive obtained and released the secret memorandum of conversation for that get-together. Guzzetti, according to that document, told Kissinger, “our main problem in Argentina is terrorism.” Kissinger replied, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures.” In other words, go ahead with your killing crusade against the leftists.

The new document shows that Kissinger was even more explicit in encouraging the Argentine junta. The memo recounts Hill describing the Kissinger-Guzzetti discussion this way:

The Argentines were very worried that Kissinger would lecture to them on human rights. Guzzetti and Kissinger had a very long breakfast but the Secretary did not raise the subject. Finally Guzzetti did. Kissinger asked how long will it take you (the Argentines) to clean up the problem. Guzzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved.

In other words, Ambassador Hill explained, Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light.

That’s a damning statement: a US ambassador saying a secretary of state had egged on a repressive regime that was engaged in a killing spree.

In August 1976, according to the new memo, Hill discussed “the matter personally with Kissinger, on the way back to Washington from a Bohemian Grove meeting in San Francisco.” Kissinger, Hill told Derian, confirmed the Guzzetti conversation and informed Hill that he wanted Argentina “to finish its terrorist problem before year end.” Kissinger was concerned about new human rights laws passed by the Congress requiring the White House to certify a government was not violating human rights before providing US aid. He was hoping the Argentine generals could wrap up their murderous eradication of the left before the law took effect.

Hill indicated to Derian, according to the new memo, that he believed that Kissinger’s message to Guzzetti had prompted the Argentine junta to intensify its dirty war. When he returned to Buenos Aires, the memo notes, Hill “saw that the terrorist death toll had climbed steeply.” And the memo reports, “Ambassador Hill said he would tell all of this to the Congress if he were put on the stand under oath. ‘I’m not going to lie,’ the Ambassador declared.”

Hill, who died in 1978, never did testify that Kissinger had urged on the Argentine generals, and the Carter administration reversed policy and made human rights a priority in its relations with Argentina and other nations. As for Kissinger, he skated—and he has been skating ever since, dodging responsibility for dirty deeds in Chile, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Kissinger watchers have known for years that he at least implicitly (though privately) endorsed the Argentine dirty war, but this new memo makes clear he was an enabler for an endeavor that entailed the torture, disappearance, and murder of tens of thousands of people. Next time you see him dancing on television, don’t laugh.

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New Memo: Kissinger Gave the "Green Light" for Argentina’s Dirty War

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Here’s the Traffic "Study" Chris Christie Wasn’t Sure Existed

by BrittanyBrice Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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More MoJo coverage of Chris Christie’s bridge scandal


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5 Unanswered Questions About Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal


New Bridge Scandal Emails: Port Authority Official Said Christie Team’s Lane Closure “Violates Federal Law”

At last week’s press conference over the George Washington Bridge lane closings that left the New Jersey borough of Fort Lee gridlocked in September, GOP Gov. Chris Christie told reporters, “Whether there was a traffic study or not, I don’t know.” But whether or not the closures were part of a legitimate study—a Christie aide ordered the lanes closed without mentioning one—the resulting gridlock was analyzed by the Port Authority. The results were a bit obvious: If you close lanes to the George Washington Bridge, you cause traffic.

The post-jam analysis was released last week by a state assembly committee investigating the scandal. It focused on what would happen if two of the three access lanes reserved for Fort Lee residents were shut down and instead made available to other drivers. Fort Lee, according to the Port Authority, provides about 4.5 percent of George Washington Bridge traffic. The remaining 95 percent or so got to work a little quicker: The 11,592 non-Fort Lee vehicles saved about 5 minutes each during the closure, resulting in about 966 vehicle hours saved. That wasn’t nearly enough to outweigh the cost—Fort Lee traffic resulted in 2,800 vehicle hours of delay. And the analysis noted that even if the traffic queues were half as long, the outcome would still be a net loss. Also, many vehicles sat so long in traffic that they missed peak toll hours, resulting in a revenue loss of $550 a day (or $137,000 over the course of a year).

A review by the Bergen Record found that the actual results may have been even worse than this analysis suggests. Other towns’ residents also use the Fort Lee access ramps, so the closed lanes delayed as much as 25 percent of the bridge’s motorists. But Port Authority political operatives used the 4.5 percent figure to try to convince nearby Republican lawmakers that the study was legitimate and that Fort Lee didn’t need three lanes, according to the Record. An email from former Port Authority official and Christie high school classmate David Wildstein to recently fired Christie aide Bridget Kelly includes talking points for Republican assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon and Jeff Bader, president of a trucking trade group, about how the closures benefited many New Jersey drivers:

Although Wildstein and other Christie allies tried to paint the closures as part of a necessary study, some Port Authority employees were suspicious. One general manager wrote in an email before the closure that the study could be done without leaving Fort Lee with only a single lane. He asked, “What is driving this?” Another supervisor replied, “A single toll lane operation invites potential disaster…It seems like we are punishing all for the sake of a few.”

As the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog points out, traffic studies rarely affect traffic at all. Engineers can measure normal traffic, simulate a closure or other change, and plug the numbers into formulas provided by the Institute of Transportation Engineers to yield the likely outcomes. When traffic does need to be altered, agencies typically do limited trial runs with a public review process to minimize the impact.

Moreover, it does not take a traffic engineer to realize that taking two of three lanes away from Fort Lee would lead to long lines and lots of waiting. But the ultimate conclusion of the post-gridlock review was not so definitive: It reads only “TBD.”

See the full report here:

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Port Authority traffic study assessment (PDF)

Port Authority traffic study assessment (Text)

Link:  

Here’s the Traffic "Study" Chris Christie Wasn’t Sure Existed

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Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna, All Grown Up

by SuzanneBl Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

As a college kid in early ’90s Olympia, Washington, Kathleen Hanna was fed up with the punk-rock boys’ club—so she made a punk rock girls’ club. With screechy vocals, dirty guitar, and fast and catchy melodies, her band Bikini Kill railed against sexism and violence against women. But the music wasn’t all: Hanna and her friends made zines and held meetings for girls who were sick of being told to act like ladies. When Bikini Kill’s second album, Pussy Whipped, gained national attention in 1993, the new movement, known as riot grrrl, took off.

Fans around the country made their own zines and girl-fronted music. When Bikini Kill broke up in 1997, Hanna went on to form her one-woman lo-fi band Julie Ruin in 1999, the dance-punk trio Le Tigre in 2003, and The Julie Ruin, a quintet that released its debut album, Run Fast, this past September. I caught up with Hanna to talk about kids these days, riot grrrl’s legacy, and why she’s glad Miley Cyrus proclaimed herself a feminist.

MJ: How would you say Run Fast differs from your past work?

KH: I really just let the record be what it was gonna be, and I didn’t control it. Like, the song that answers the person’s letter who writes me and says, “I’m gay and I came out to my family and they kicked me out of my house and I feel totally suicidal.” And then I write a song for that person. I couldn’t do that with this record. I really needed to write something just for me.

MJ: A lot of your older stuff spoke directly to young women. Who’s your audience now?

KH: I’m not really thinking about whom I’m writing for. It got to the point where it started to feel like everything in my work was audience-based. In Le Tigre and in Bikini Kill, people said, “You’re preaching to the converted.” In Bikini Kill, it was ridiculous because most of our audience was way more than halfway male. But in Le Tigre, we had already developed this feminist queer community who supported our band, and I would say, “Yeah, and that’s great, because the converted don’t have enough music or arts made for them.” I was really into that. But now, I don’t want to have an audience in mind. I don’t consider myself a divining rod whom God is speaking through or any kind of crap like that. I’m specific about the work I’m making, but just letting there be a little more play and freedom.

MJ: Do you see the riot grrrl movement persisting in today’s culture?

KH: Yeah, I mean, look at Pussy Riot. There’s an old picture of me with “Pussy” and “Riot” written on my arms in Sharpie. I also see girls’ rock camps all around the country and in the UK. There are so many women my age who got involved with that early on, and so many bands that were considered riot grrrl bands who’ve been teaching at the camps. I’m not taking credit for it. I remember the first time I walked in and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t have to do this! These other amazing women did this, and I can just enjoy it.”

MJ: Has it gotten easier for young women to be in bands?

KH: I think it must be, because there are so many more all-female bands and they play instruments—they’re not just, you know, a vocal group someone puts together. But I meet women who are dealing with the kind of crap that we dealt with—you know, guys yelling at them when they’re on stage, or these horrible comments on the internet that say, “Oh, you’re only getting attention because you’re girls” or “You’re fat and you’re ugly” or “You’re beautiful and that’s why people like you.” And when I hear that, I get really sad because I’m like, “Wow, we haven’t come very far.”

MJ: I’ve gotta ask: What did you think about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs?

KH: You know, I didn’t see it. I could’ve watched it on the internet, but I just didn’t want to, because I don’t really care. I just feel like the healthcare situation, the recent government shutdown, all of the events around the world are just so much more important. I do think it’s really cool that Miley Cyrus said she’s the biggest feminist ever. I was like, “That’s the sound of 200,000 eight-year-olds Googling the word ‘feminist!'” I was pleased.

MJ: Have your interests become less about personal politics over the years, and more about global politics?

KH: Yeah, definitely. I think a lot about how so many women can’t contribute their voices to the feminist movement because they’re just trying to put food on the table. Or they have an illness that they can’t get treated because they don’t have health insurance. I think a lot about people who die unnecessarily because they don’t get to see the good doctors. Those kinds of things move me in a similar way that violence against women moved me in the beginning of Bikini Kill. And of course, that still totally upsets me, but poverty is really utmost in my mind right now.

MJ: When I was a teenager just discovering Bikini Kill, this music was kind of how my friends and I formed our identities. Is it still possible for young people to have that kind of a relationship with music?

KH: I don’t know because I’m not a young person anymore. But it’s…there’s just so much! I’m amazed that younger people can absorb anything. I gotta be honest about the way that I listen to music, and this is really letting it all hang out: I watch videos on YouTube of bands that I’ve heard of that I want to check out. And sometimes I don’t even finish the video. And that’s really sad, because maybe I’d like that song. I think that we don’t give stuff a chance to really sink in.

Below, the Julie Ruin. And click here for Hanna’s rundown of what she’s been listening to lately.

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Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna, All Grown Up

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